It’s been a while since my last post and a few things happened since then. Among others, the release of vCloud Director 8.20 for Service Providers. The latest version of vCloud Director is fully supported by vca-cli (vCloud Air Command Line Interface). This post provides several examples of using vca-cli with vCD 8.20 for performing common tasks.

The vCloud Air Command Line Interface is a traditional solution for interactive, text-based operations, which allows scripting and lightweight automation. In this post I’m going to talk about another approach to automation that we’ve been working on at vCloud Air for the last few months: TOSCA Application Blueprints.

In previous posts I have introduced vca-cli (vCloud Air Command Line Interface) and provided examples of specific use cases. This post gives an overview of the current features (as of version 10) and highlights some vCloud Air features that are only available through vca-cli (or through API): independent disks management, edge gateway logs capture and advanced VPN tunnel configuration.

vCloud Air accounts provide a pretty sophisticated virtual data center where users can create virtual machines. Protecting the access to the virtual data center, there is a feature-rich edge gateway that includes a firewall. In some cases it is necessary to monitor the activity of the firewall. The following article shows how to configure the firewall to send logging messages to a syslog server.

For those minimalist DevOps engineers out there, this post describes how to provision a virtual machine at vCloud Air, the quickest way possible. The steps include adding a public SSH key and configuring the network to make the machine SSH-Ready.